Last Updated on December 5, 2024 by Stephinie Heitman
The Sticky is a 2024 Comedy and Crime TV series created by Brian Donovan & Ed Herro. The film stars Margo Martindale, Chris Diamantopoulos, Guillaume Cyr, Gita Miller, Guy Nadon, Mickaël Gouin, and Suzanne Clément, the series consists of 8 episodes total and will be released on December 6, 2024.
The Blumhouse-produced series is loosely based on a real-life heist of over $2 million in Canada’s Quebec between 2011 and 2012.
Depending on sugar content, the ratio of sap required to yield syrup is typically in the range of 40:1, that is why ‘real’ maple syrup is so expensive and why your more recognizable ‘maple’ syrups are so elusive when it comes to the actual content.
The Sticky quite accurately embodies a recently popular trend in television wherein programs are wrapped up in a conceptual framework that is damaging to their structure. As for what has premiered on the platform, Amazon Prime Video offers viewers a six-part first season of an ongoing show, while the plot strongly suggests that the series is best suited to be a delightful 90-minute indie flick that would have been sold like hotcakes at Sundance in the old days. Or perhaps they are as simple as, say, a 65-minute premiere of a new season of Fargo – Far-Goo, if you wish.
Conversely, it may have been better suited for a longer format or the format of the program was unsustainable for such content. Even with the story already seemingly dragged out, it has six non-ending episodes that run at only thirty minutes each, and as much as the show can benefit from being quirkier or more focused on characters, it lacks enough insight into Quebeçois culture. Perhaps six episodes of 50 minutes each with a final episode to wrap up would have been more fulfilling.
Regardless of the excess and the absence of it, The Sticky at least has to go for its speed and finally give Margo Martindale a well-deserved promotion at the top of this call sheet.
What is the Sticky Tv-Series All About
While the events in the series may be based on real-life situations, the show’s title card clearly states that it is ‘not’ a true story at the beginning of each episode. Yes, people will work to steal maple syrup from a governing syrup body in Quebec, but outside of that, those are pretty much their only similarities. However, it is crucial to note that each character who is associated with the heist in The Sticky is imaginary.
The longtime popular television show for which she won an Emmy portrays her as Ruth Landry, a maple syrup producer residing in a Quebec city. Ruth is a regular member of the show, while her husband has been in a coma for several years now. Feeling vulnerable, the protagonist, Guy Nadon’s Leonard Gauthier, the unfair, manipulative director of the Quebec provincial sugar organization (AEQ or Association Érable Québec) eliminates her from her property: first, legally through official powers and then, in other unlawful ways.
Experiencing a different type of desperation is Remy Bouchard (Guillaume Cyr), the only security guard at the warehouse that is maple syrup storehouse, a facility for hundreds of barrels worth, tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Illogical Remy, far from a genius, also tends to feel unappreciated and easily blamed. He just wishes to be given backup to assist him in his significant position yet Leonard and his son and successor Léo Gauthier (Mickaël Gouin) continuously turn him down.
So Remy contacts Mike (Chris Diamantopoulos), who is a former bag man for a Boston-based organized crime syndicate. Some of the jobs performed by Mike are pestering small businesses and just gardening at the mansion belonging to … well, I really do not know the name of the owner of the house…
Mike, for example, must be one of the most nondescript and unremarkable characters I’ve ever read: nearly every aspect of his personality is inexplicable. Because one day his aspirations turned him into a joke for something that will also be later explained, it is logical that the family will send him to a job in a place that does not exist. But one moment he is all weak and vulnerable, and in another he is so terrifyingly insane. He seems to have been doing this particular activity for at least a few years with the oblivion of half of the inhabitants and the ridicule of the other half. He insists that Ruth’s comatose husband is like a brother to him, yet there is no description or suggestion of how this could be possibly true.
But for some unknown reason, while the Boston mob in Quebec is in the process of collecting only from minute farmers and owners of small enterprises in the province, Mike has no relation to the only wealthy organization in the whole province. Thus, when Remy approaches him at a hibachi restaurant — Mike has a girlfriend who has never been introduced and is never heard of again — and suggests that they steal the syrup reserve, Mike reacts as if the idea is news to him.
He is impressed, and with the fact that Ruth is struggling hard to make ends meet, he invites her to join him. As Tony and Pierre advance their criminal plan as well as the number of murders, they start to attract the attention of local police detectives like Teddy Gita Miller and the mute Detective Valérie Nadeau played by Suzanne Clément who arrives from Montreal with no explication. The two police officers do not have a personality between the two of them but in the movie, and without any provocation, they start holding hands. I say this not to spoil the ending but to illustrate how weak the narrative fabric is in this movie.
That is so much the case that relatively simple things do not happen at all, and, in the end, I would have liked to raise my hand to ask Brian Donovan and Ed Herro, the show’s creators, if they could bring the scene that was cut because they did not fit into the general scheme, but filled the logical voids that I was observing. It has the structure of a plot but isn’t a plot itself.
This shapelessness is traceable back to Blumhouse Television production, the company that produced it. Yes, there was a real incident of maple syrup theft in Quebec from 2011 to 2012, but otherwise, it is evident from the opening titles that, “This is not based on the real events of The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.” Even if the national maple syrup reserve was a thing and the writers found out about it, they decided to forget all the details given in Dirty Money: they got a plot of a small-town heist which is rather clichéd in its simplicity and much more limited in terms of the scope.
Before the characters themselves refer to the scandal involving Nancy Kerrigan, I took notes that The Sticky seems to be similar to Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya. Still, both films employ grim humor involving the dehumanized plight of a desperate rural life with a broadly snobbish outlook on the lower class. This series is less mocking of its de-glammed subjects than that movie was, but not much.
Even though Cap’n Crunch and Milk-Duds cereal commercials punctuate the movie, making the Ojibwe community feel somewhat genuine thanks to shooting locations in Quebec, there’s just not enough depth to any of these characters to garner the sort of empathy needed for this kind of narrative.
The character most often portrayed with derision is possibly Diamantopoulos’s Mike, who cannot walk properly on the set and is constantly shivering from the cold. I don’t think the show has any real affection for Remy, but thanks to the presence of Remy’s loving father, well-played by Michel Perron, he has perhaps the series’ lone sympathetic relationship.
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I should explain, however, that none of these performances indicate that contempt. Cyr portrays Remy as pathetic, but rightfully angry at being the town’s scapegoat for everyone’s frustration. Another notable cameo of the series is Jamie Lee Curtis, who is an executive producer of the series and plays a role in one episode and hams it up perfectly. Diamantopoulos, an actor who likes to play powerful characters to the extreme, skips a lot of obvious opportunities for bombast, such as a Boston accent, which must have been a discussion.
Currently, the only actors putting on Quebeçois accents are the ones who originate from Quebec, which makes a lot of sense. That being said, if The Sticky was slightly more offbeat or comical, then the chance of the entire affair playing out like a Letterkenny plotline was a possibility. One gets the impression that there are many easy French-Canadian stereotypes one could make jokes on and none of them have been presented in the series. Not because they were replaced by better jokes — they were simply left on the trimming floor along with backstory and logistics.
Any claim that this show has to reality stems solely from the fact that Martindale is its focal point. She is rude most of the time, cursing people and growing more annoyed as the story advances, but it is impossible to believe she is in the wrong and one can only empathize with her. The only folks who will not draw parallels between Ruth and her kindly yet vicious criminal counterpart, Mags Bennett are viewers who did not watch the second season of Justified. Those are the luckiest people of all. Skip The Sticky. Watched Justified. There are no efficiency problems there.
The Sticky 2024 Parents Guide & Age Rating
The Sticky is not rated because it has not undergone the official rating process by the Motion Picture Rating (MPA).
